>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C..
[ Silence ]   >> Rob Casper: Hello everyone.
Thanks for coming out.   What a crowd.
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that at a noontime event
on an unseasonably warm day in January in Washington,
D.C. we'd get more than a standing room only crowd, a crowded crowd.
My name is Rob Casper.
I'm the Head of the Poetry and Literature Center here
at the Library of Congress and I want to welcome you here today
for this afternoon's program, the first in the Poetry
and Literature Center's calendar for 2013.
First of all, I need to ask you to turn off your cell phones
and all the electronic devices that you might have that can interfere
with our recording equipment.
And I also want to let you know that this program is being recorded both
by the Library of Congress and by Fox News
and by participating you give us permission
and you give Fox News permission for future use of this recording,
has presented programs such as this one for 75 years.
We are celebrating this great anniversary with a packed season
of readings, panels and lectures.
But, as you walk out today, if it's not too crazy,
please visit our table right outside the door and sign
up for our email notifications.
I know many of you already have, but if you haven't and you want to find
out more about poetry and literature at the library, please set that up.
We also have some fliers with select events coming up and brochures.
Can you hear me?   Is that better?
Sorry. Today's program with Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey,
is special for a number of reasons.   First: It marks the start
of Natasha's historic residency at the library.
She will work and receive visitors in the Poetry Room,
which is just up in the attic of this building until her term ends
in May, a first for the Laureateship.
Today, she will set the stage for months to come
by addressing history, our country's, but also her own.
Her focus is The Civil War in conjunction
with the library's exhibit, "The Civil War in America"
of which the New York Times states, "It doesn't explicitly ask questions
about means and ends, but we can't help thinking about them
as the letters, diaries, documents and images accumulate", end quote.
Natasha's reading will follow such a course as she intersperses poems
of her own with on the war with poems by her predecessors.
And one might argue today's program marks the natural progression
of Natasha's work on The Civil War; work that began over a decade ago
when she came to the Library of Congress
to research the Louisiana Native Guard and it ended
up her writing the title poem to her Pulitzer Prize winning collection.
And actually, she wrote it in the main reading room,
which I'm sure many of you have been to.
Natasha will read for approximately a half hour then we will open
up the floor to questions from you.
Afterwards we'll scoot Natasha out and she'll move
up to the second floor outside, "The Civil War
in America" exhibit for a book signing.
I hope you will take that opportunity to visit
or to revisit the exhibit and let what we are
about to hear intermingle with the wealth of stories
and images Exhibition Director, Cheryl Regan,
and her team at the library's Interpretive Programs Office
has assembled.
I should also say that when Natasha was here back in I think 2002,
2004 she looked at a facsimile of a book that was a basis
of her catacomb native garb.
Cheryl Regan, who I just mentioned, is in the back corner
over there behind this podium with not only that facsimile
that Natasha used, but the original copy of the book,
so it's worth checking out and one of the many reasons the library is
such a essential resource for the country.
The aim of this program is to celebrate poetries unique ability
to reframe our past and examine how and why we see it as we do
and no one is more accomplished at this essential work
than our newest Poet Laureate.
I would also like to take this opportunity
to publicly welcome Natasha to the Library of Congress.
I have known her for many, many years and she is one
of the most committed, welcoming
and truly inspiring poets I have ever met.
I feel honored to join the rest of the staff here at the library
in supporting her Laureateship, one which has already resonated
across the country and clearly resonated with all of you and one
which will continue to promote the art in new and vital ways.
So, please join me in welcoming our 19th Poet Laureate Consultant
in Poetry, Natasha Trethewey.   [ Applause ]
>> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you.   Thank you very much.
Thank you.   Well, good afternoon.
It's a delight to be here and I thank you all for coming.
I'm going to talk a little bit today about The Civil War in the poetry
and prose of Walt Whitman and read a few of his poems and some of my own.
Because of his open armed enthusiasm, his inclusiveness
in celebration of everyone, even the lowliest prostitute
or degraded slave, Walt Whitman's work has come to represent a poetics
of democracy, a human tradition of anti-racism.
And even now there is much to be learned from him
and from his conflicted relationship to his subject matter especially
as Americans near and far are still fighting ideologically The
Civil War.
A champion of American experience, the diversity of its people
and their labors Whitman feared that the real war would not get written.
He believed that war existed in the alternative narrative
that might be offered by so many anonymous soldiers, most dead
and buried often in unmarked graves, whose stories would never be told.
Whitman's, "Specimen Days" becomes a kind of monument
to the common soldier, the harsh facts
of war recorded in his honest language.
And yet there is little written
of black soldiers though he mentions tending to them as well.
Among the black soldiers wounded or sick
and in the contraband camps I also took my way whenever
in their neighborhood and did what I could for them.
This is only a slight acknowledgement from the poet
who wrote with such great inclusiveness of blacks
in such poems as, "I Sing the Body Electric" and, "Song of Myself."
Perhaps a more telling poem however, one that suggests the complexity
of Whitman's conflicted relationship to the South
and all her citizens is, "Reconciliation."
Reconciliation, Word all over, beautiful as the sky,
beautiful that war, and that all its deeds of carnage,
must in time be utterly lost; that the hands of the sisters death
and night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again,
the soiled world: For my enemy is dead,
a man divine as myself is dead; I look where he lies, white-faced
and still, in the coffin, I draw near; bend down, and touch lightly
with my lips the white face in the coffin.
In this poem Whitman suggests the reunion of the nation,
men on opposites sides of the war drawn together beneath the banner
of reconciliation.
However, in the final image of the dead,
white-faced in the coffin Whitman leaves out the reality
of so many dead soldiers whose faces were not white.
And further, according to historian David Blight, the poem highlights
in the kinship of the dead white brothers, the ultimate betrayal
of the dark-faced folk whom the dead had shared in liberating.
This kind of erasure would continue to dominate Civil War memory
as monuments to only part of the story inscribed in narrative
on the American landscape, particularly in the South.
" The Lost War", then is the narrative
of black Americans whose stories were often subjugated,
lost or left out of public memory
and in the creation of public monuments.
Just off the coast of my hometown, Gulfport, Mississippi is a series
of barrier islands, Cat, Horn, Deer and Ship Island,
that separate the dirty waters of the coastal area with its dead fish
and debris from the clearer waters out in the Gulf.
Ship Island is a Civil War site
and during the warmer months anyone can buy passage on one
of the small cruisers making the daily trips out there
and take a brief tour offered by the National Park Service.
The island's history is an interesting one.
The 1st Regiments of the Louisiana Native Guards were mustard
into service in September, October and November of 1862.
The 1st Regiment thus becoming the first official sanctioned regiment
of black soldiers in the Union Army and the 2nd and 3rd made up of men
who had been slaves only months before enlisting.
During the war the fort at Ship Island,
Mississippi called Fort Massachusetts was maintained
as a prison for Confederate soldiers, military convicts
and prisoners of war manned by the 2nd Regiment.
In his wartime remembrances Whitman pointed
out that few white regiments made a better appearance on parade
than the 1st and 2nd Louisiana Native Guards.
He had seen them on parade in Louisiana and
yet only a few years ago visitors
to the fort would learn almost none of the history.
Instead they'd see first the plaque placed at the entrance
by The Daughters of the Confederacy listing the names
of the Confederate men once interred there,
nowhere a similar plaque memorializing the names
of the Native Guards.
And if tourists didn't know to ask about the history
of the black soldiers, most likely the Park Ranger overlooked this
aspect of the fort's history in his tour, mentioning only
that this war was-- that this was a fort taken over by Union forces
and that Confederate prisoners were kept there.
This omission serves to further the narrative
that blacks were passive recipients of the freedom bestowed upon them
by white brothers who fought and died in The Civil War.
In February 2005, in the Vicksburg National Military Park,
a monument to these black soldiers was finally erected,
though not without certain omissions.
According to, "The Jackson Advocate" during the earlier groundbreaking
ceremony Park Superintendent Bill Nichols
and Park Historian Terry Winchel begrudgingly labeled the black
regiments as supply guards in the text on display rather
than giving the men their full measure of respect
as the fully recognized infantry, artillery
and cavalry units that they were.
That a more inclusive history of black soldiers is not given
on Ship Island or in the Vicksburg Military Park
and that certain facts are often left
out of the historical narratives and perhaps
until most recently were likely to be given only the smallest part
in larger histories is emblematic of the ideological context about how
to remember The Civil War, how we construct public memory
with its omissions and embellishments.
As David Blight asserts in, "Race and Reunion:
The Civil War in American Memory, deflections and evasions,
careful remembering and necessary forgetting and embittered
and irreconcilable versions
of experience are all the stuff of historical memory."
Though Whitman had acknowledged black soldiers in his letters
in reminiscences ultimately he often left blacks
out of his larger concerns.
When the South is spoken of he wrote, "Contrasting the roles
of the ruling class and the masses,
no one means the people, the mass of free men."
Here Whitman is referring to the free white masses even
as his language reminds us
of the invisible freed men all around the South.
In fact, according to Daniel Aaron in, "The Unwritten War,
the negro did not figure significantly in his calculations
of America's future, the grand plan of history.
And it is just as mistaken to confuse Whitman's prose,
opinion of the Negro and the poetic use he made of him in,
"Leaves of Grass" as it is
to identify his antislavery position with abolitionism.
At the groundbreaking ceremony
to the new monument historian Jim Woodrich's words seem
to echo Whitman's more than a century old prediction
that the real war would not get into the books.
"By being here today", Woodrich began, "we acknowledge the valor
and honor of the black Union troops.
"Their story" he said, "yearns to be known."
William Faulkner has said, "The past isn't dead.
It isn't even past."
All around us debates about the memory of The Civil War
and its aftermath continue to shape contemporary concerns.
These issues are ultimately fights about remembrance,
how we see ourselves as Americans within the context of history.
When The Daughters of the Confederacy mounted the plaque
at Ship Island they were working to inscribe their exclusive version
of history onto the public memory leaving
out the other population on the island.
See then Woodward and his preface to, "Jumpin' Jim Crow:
Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights" a search that drew
in the last two centuries of the 19th Century,
the last two decades of the 19th Century.
It was the first who were white ladies
who bore the primary responsibility
for the myths glorifying the old order,
the lost cause and white supremacy.
Woodward is referring specifically to The United Daughters
of the Confederacy, The Daughters of the American Revolution,
Daughters of Pilgrims and Daughters of Colonial Governors.
They were considered guardians of the past.
Non-daughters he writes, "Were excluded."
The efforts of The Daughters
of the Confederacy extended beyond the erecting of monuments
and the naming of roads, indeed they commissioned the history textbooks
written for southern schools and oversaw the material contained
within them in order to control the narrative
of the South's role in the war.
That is to tell a story that was rife with omissions
and embellishments that sought to cast the causes of the war only
in terms of states' rights and not at all in the matter of slavery.
It would seem that Whitman
in his conflicted attitudes toward the roles of both North and South,
towards slavery and black suffrage.
He hated slavery, but did not believe blacks capable
of exercising a vote could foresee such one-sided narratives
and the need for a fuller understanding of the roots
of the conflict, a history more inclusive than what would be told
and written for several generations.
Whitman knew all too well that the real war he feared would not get
written was not a pleasant one, referring primarily
to the seething hill and black infernal background
of countless minor scenes he nonetheless foreshadows another
backdrop, the narrative of blacks relegated the margins
of public memory.   Long, long hints he anticipated
when the grave has quenched many hot prejudices and vitalities
and an entirely new class of thinkers and writers come
to the argument the complete question can perhaps be
fairly weighed.
When Whitman took on the task of setting down on paper some
of his thoughts about The Civil War, its causes and its aftermath,
he probably did not have the image of the black soldier
in the foreground of his thinking,
though his wartime reminiscences would consider regiments
of black troops.
His poem, "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" focuses on a dusky woman
so ancient, hardly human and not black soldiers who were participants
"Ethiopia Saluting the Colors."
Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human, with your woolly-white
and turbaned head, and bare bony feet?
Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?
Tis while our army lines Carolina's sands and pines,
forth from thy hovel thou Ethiopia comist to me,
as under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.
Me master a hundred years since from my parents sundered a little child,
they caught me as the savage beast is caught, then hither me
across the sea the cruel slaver brought.
No further does she say, but lingering all the day, her high
but worn turbaned head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,
and courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by.
What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human?
Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green?
Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?
[ Silence ]
>> The omission inherent even in his later writings
about the war underscore the questions of historical memory
with which future generations would contend.
Probably no future age could know, but I will know how the jest
of this fiercest and most resolute
of the world's warlike contentions resided exclusively in the unnamed,
unknown rank and file and how the brunt of its labor of death was
to all essential purposes volunteered.
Here Whitman directs us to the unnamed, unknown rank
and file white soldier and inadvertently to black soldiers
as well, The legions of runaway slaves and freed men who flock
to Union camps first as contraband and then later as men
and women eager to enlist whose story has been left
out of public memory of The Civil War and has only begun
to be inscribed into the manmade monumental American landscape.
In positioning myself as a native daughter, a native guardian
of Mississippi's past I've sought to tell a fuller version
of our shared history filling in the opening that Walt Whitman made
for that entirely new generation of thinkers and writers.
When I was growing up in Mississippi I would go out every 4th of July
with my grandmother to the fort on Ship Island and take the tour
of the fort, never learning anything
about that history when I was a child.
So, coming to the library was a wonderful experience
to find those documents that I could look at right there,
Civil War soldiers writing letters from Ship Island.
Also the image, which is on the cover of this book
that represents a page from the diary of the colonel
who was stationed there that I got to actually look at,
when you look at it close up what you can see is that because
of the shortage of paper the Union Colonel who confiscated it
from a Confederate home had to cross write
over what was already written inside the journal.
So, what you have is the words going one way across the page
and then turn and go the other way and it becomes this perfect metaphor
for the intersections of North and South,
black and white, slave and free.
In order to write the poems one of the first things I had
to do was take a pilgrimage back to my Mississippi.
"Pilgrimage: Vicksburg, Mississippi."
Here, the Mississippi carved its mud-dark path,
a graveyard for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
Here, the river changed its course, turning away from the city
as one turns, forgetting, from the past, the abandoned bluffs,
land sloping up above the river's bend,
where now the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.
Here, the dead stand up in stone, white marble, on Confederate Avenue.
I stand on ground once hollowed by a web of caves; they must have seemed
like catacombs in 1863, to the woman sitting
in her parlor, candlelit, underground.
I can see her listening to shells explode writing herself
into history, asking what is to become
of all the living things in this place?
This whole city is a grave.
Every spring, Pilgrimage, the living come to mingle with the dead,
brush against their cold shoulders in the long hallways,
listen all night to their silence and indifference, relive their dying
on the green battlefield.
At the museum, we marvel at their clothes, preserved under glass,
so much smaller than our own,
as if those who wore them were only children.
We sleep in their beds, the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs,
draped in flowers, funereal, a blur of petals against the river's gray.
The brochure in my room calls this living history.
The brass plate on the door reads, Prissy's Room.
A window frames the river's crawl toward the Gulf.
In my dream, the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over,
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> So, I'm going to read now the title poem of the book,
"Native Guard", which is the poem that I worked
on so many years ago here at the library and in the reading room.
This poem takes as a starting point a black soldier
who would have been a freed slave,
someone who had been owned previously by Major Dumas.
Major Dumas was an officer in the 2nd Regiment of the Union Army,
the Louisiana Native Guards who when he was born himself octaroon
or quadroon.
He was the son of a white planter father and a mulatto mother
and inherited his father's slaves when he was a young man,
because it was illegal to manumit slaves in Louisiana he did not do
that even though he didn't like having slaves.
But, when the Union began to recruit black soldiers he freed his slaves
and encouraged his men to join as well.
The battles that I mention in the poem are also actual skirmishes.
The poem has an epigraph from Frederick Douglass that reads,
"If this war is to be forgotten I ask in the name
of all things sacred what shall men remember."
"Native Guard: November 1862."
Truth be told, I do not want to forget anything of my former life:
The landscape's song of bondage, dirge in the river's throat,
where it churns into the Gulf, wind in trees choked with vines.
I thought to carry with me want of freedom, though I had been freed,
remembrance not constant recollection.
Yes: I was born a slave, at harvest time, in the Parish of Ascension;
I've reached thirty-three with history
of one younger inscribed upon my back.
I now use ink to keep record, a closed book, not the lure of memory,
flawed, changeful that dulls the lash for the master,
sharpens it for the slave.   "December 1862."
For the slave, having a master sharpens the bend into work,
the way the sergeant moves us now
to perfect battalion drill, dress parade.
Still, we're called supply units, not infantry and so we dig trenches,
haul burdens for the army, no less heavy than before.
I heard the colonel call it nigger work.
Half rations make our work familiar still.
We take those things we need from the Confederates' abandoned homes:
salt, sugar, even this journal, near full with someone else's words,
overlapped now, crosshatched beneath mine, on every page,
his story intersecting with my own.   "January 1863."
O how history intersects,
my own berth upon a ship called the Northern Star and I'm delivered
into a new life, Fort Massachusetts.
A great irony, both path and destination
of freedom I'd not dared to travel.
Here, now, I walk ankle-deep in sand, fly-bitten, nearly smothered
by heat, and yet I can look out upon the Gulf and see the surf breaking,
tossing the ships, the great gunboats bobbing on the water.
And are we not the same, slaves in the hands of the master, destiny?
Night sky red with the promise of fortune, dawn coming pink
as new flesh, healing unfettered.   "January 1863."
Today, dawn red as warning.
Unfettered supplies, stacked on the beach at our landing,
washed away in the storm that rose too fast, caught us unprepared.
Later, as we worked, I joined in the low singing someone raised
to pace us, and felt a bond in labor I had not known.
It was then a dark man removed his shirt, reveal the scars,
crosshatched like the lines in this journal, on his back.
It was he who remarked at how the ropes cracked like whips
on the sand, made us take note of the wild dance
of a tent loosed by wind.   We watched and learned.
Like any shrewd master, we know now to tie down what we will keep.
"February 1863."
We know it is our duty now to keep white men as prisoners,
rebel soldiers, would be masters.
We're all bondsmen here, each to the other.
Freedom has gotten them captivity.
For us, a conscription we have chosen, jailors to those
who still would have us slaves.
They are cautious, dreading the sight of us.
Some neither read nor write, are laid too low and have few words
to send, but those I give them.
Still they are wary of a Negro writing, taking down letters.
X binds them to the page, a mute symbol like the cross on a grave.
I suspect they fear I'll listen, put something else down in ink.
"March 1863."
I listen, put down in ink what I know they labor to say
between silences too big for words: Worry for beloveds.
My Dearest, how are you getting along, what has become
of their small plots of land?
Did you harvest enough food to put by?
They long for the comfort of former lives.
I see you as you were, waving goodbye.
Some send photographs, a likeness in case the body can't return.
Others dictate harsh facts of this war: The hot air carries the stench
of limbs, rotten in the bone pit.   Flies swarm, a black cloud.
We hunger, grow weak.
When men die, we eat their share of hardtack.
"April 1863."
When men die, we eat their share of hardtack trying not
to recall their hollow sockets, the worm-stitch of their cheeks.
Today we buried the last of our dead from Pascagoula and those
who died retreating to our ship,
white sailors in blue firing upon us as if we were the enemy.
I'd thought the fighting over, then watched a man fall beside me,
knees-first as in prayer, then another, his arms outstretched
as if borne upon the cross.
Smoke that rose from each gun seemed a soul departing.
The Colonel said an unfortunate incident;
said their names shall deck the page of history.
"June 1863."
Some names shall deck the page of history as it is written on stone.
Some will not.
Yesterday, word came of colored troops, dead on the battlefield
at Port Hudson; how General Banks was heard
to say I have no dead there, and left them, unclaimed.
Last night, I dreamt their eyes still open, dim, clouded as the eyes
of fish washed ashore, yet fixed, staring back at me.
Still, more come today eager to enlist.
Their bodies haggard, faces, gaunt limbs bring news of the mainland.
Starved, they suffer like our prisoners.
Dying, they plead for what we do not have to give.
Death makes equals of us all: a fair master.
"August 1864."   Dumas was a fair master to us all.
He taught me to read and write: I was a man-servant, if not a man.
At my work, I studied natural things, all manner of plants,
birds I draw now in my book: wren, willet, egret, loon.
Tending the gardens, I thought only to study live things,
thought never to know so much about the dead.
Now, I tend Ship Island graves, mounds like dunes
that shift and disappear.
I record names, send home simple notes, not much more than how
and when an official duty.
I'm told it's best to spare most detail, but I know there are things
which must be accounted for.
"1865." These are things which must be accounted for:
Slaughter under the white flag of surrender, black massacre
at Fort Pillow; our new name, the Corps d'Afrique,
words that take the native from our claim; mossbacks and freedmen,
exiles in their own homeland; the diseased, the maimed,
every lost limb, and what remains: Phantom ache,
memory haunting an empty sleeve; the hog-eaten at Gettysburg,
unmarked in their graves; all the dead letters, unanswered;
untold stories of those that time will render mute.
Beneath battlefields, green again, the dead molder,
a scaffolding of bone we tread upon, forgetting.
Truth be told.   [Applause] Thank you.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
I'm going to finish up with two short poems now and then we can open
up the floor for questions.
This is a poem after a well-known painting by Winslow Homer,
"Veteran in a New Field."
Perhaps some, many of you have seen it.
When I think about looking at a painting like that one and deciding
to write a poem about it, it still is for me about thinking
about that opening that Walt Whitman makes for us to insert the histories
that have been lesser known or forgotten.
In looking at, "Veteran in a New Field" I think
of other veterans and their fields.   There's an epigraph that reads,
"The dead they lay along the lines like sheaves of wheat.
I could have walked on the bodies almost from one end to the other."
"Again, the fields."
No more muskets, the bone-drag weariness of marching,
the trampled grass, soaked earth red as the wine of sacrament.
Now, the veteran turns toward a new field,
bright as domes of the republic.
Here, he has shrugged off the past, his jacket
and canteen flung down in the corner.
At the center of the painting he anchors the Trinity joining Earth
and sky.
The wheat falls beneath his scythe, a language of bounty,
the swaths like scriptures on the field's open page.
Boundless, the wheat stretches beyond the frame
as if toward a distant field, the white canvas where sky
and cotton meet, where another veteran toils,
his hands the color of dark soil.   [ Silence ]
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
And this last poem has an epigraph from a famous poem
by a former Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry,
Allen Tate, another southerner.
This is from his poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead."
Now that the salt of their blood stiffens the saltier oblivion
of the sea.   "Elegy for the Native Guards."
We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead trailing the boa,
streamers, noisy fanfare, all the way to Ship Island.
What we see first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee,
half reminder of the men who served there,
a weathered monument to some of the dead.
Inside we follow the ranger, hurried though we are to get to the beach.
He tells of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split in half
when Hurricane Camille hit, shows us casemates, cannons,
the store that sells souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.
The Daughters of the Confederacy has placed a plaque here,
at the fort's entrance,
each Confederate soldier's name raised hard in bronze;
no names carved for the Native Guards 2nd Regiment,
Union men, black phalanx.   What is monument to their legacy?
All the grave markers, all the crude headstones, water-lost.
Now, fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high, round, unfinished,
half open to the sky, the elements, wind, rain, God's deliberate eye.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Rob Casper: So, great thanks to Natasha
and now we'll have questions from the audience.
We have a staffer here who has a microphone.
Make sure you wait until she comes along to give you the microphone
so you can be recorded for our, for [Inaudible].
>> Kerry: Hi, I'm Kerry Mellon-Yurek and I welcome you to Washington.
Very excited about your residence--   >> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you.
>> Kerry: And how serious you're taking the position.
I'd like to know if you made a list of the top three things
that you would like to accomplish as the Laureate?
>> Natasha Trethewey: The top three things that I'd
like to accomplish as the Laureate.
Bring poetry to a wider audience, bring poetry to a wider audience,
bring poetry to a wider audience.   [ Applause ]
>> Now, if we went further there'd be some more, but I'm going to stick
with those as the top three.
>> Hi, to paraphrase my granddaughter, it's so cool to be
in this room listening to you.
I enjoyed your interview with the Diane Wheems.
>> Natasha Trethewey: Me too.
>> And especially the part where you just found out your [Inaudible].
And then I recall that [Inaudible].
Okay, but I would like to ask you if you could kindly read help
from [Inaudible] which you read [Inaudible]
and it's touched me deeply.
>> Natasha Trethewey: Well, actually, "Help" is from, "Thrall."
>> Yes, "Thrall."
>> Natasha Trethewey: I'd be happy to read it if someone had,
"Thrall" in the audience by any chance.
>> I have it.
>> Natasha Trethewey: Do you have it.
[Laughter] I was going-- I thought you know if I had to try
to recite it, I probably could.   But, I like to have the--
>> I can sign it for you.
>> Natasha Trethewey: I like to-- okay.
I like to have the words in front of me, thank you.
Well, this is also an agrestic poem.
It's one based on a photograph by Robert Frank
"Help 1968."
When I see Frank's photograph of a white infant in the dark arms
of a woman who must be the maid, I think of my mother
and the year we spent alone, my father at sea.
The woman stands in profile, back against a wall, holding her charge,
their faces side-by-side, the look
on the child's face strangely prescient,
a tiny furrow in the space between her brows.
Neither of them looks toward the camera;
nor do they look at each other.
That year, when my mother took me for walks,
she was mistaken again and again for my maid.
Years later she told me she'd say I was her daughter,
and each time strangers would stare in disbelief,
then empty the change from their pockets.
Now, I think of the betrayals of flesh, how she must have tried
to make of her face an inscrutable mask and hold it there
as they made their small offerings, pressing coins into my hands.
How like the woman in the photograph she must have seemed,
carrying me each day white in her arms as if she were a prop:
A black backdrop, the dark foil in this American story.
>> Thank you.   >> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you.
[ Applause ]   [ Silence ]
>> Would you describe as you have traveled
around the country the response that you receive to your sense
and sensitivity to this history in North and South and any distinction
between the two readings.   >> Natasha Trethewey: Um hmm.
Did you all hear the question?   >> No.
>> Natasha Trethewey: He's asking about in my travels
around the country what sense do I get of people's response,
their sense and sensitivity toward some of the history that I'm trying
to work with in my poems and whether
or not they're any differences North and South.
Did I get it all?
You know what I actually find a lot more sensitivity
than I might have imagined because when I was working on both
of these books, the book I read from, "Native Guard"
and also the most recent collection, "Thrall" I knew that I was dealing
with difficult history, history that of course is very much woven
into the thread of who we are as Americans and yet material
that is still difficult for us to talk about sometimes.
And what I have found is not only to go back to the previous question,
not only do people come to poetry readings
and listen very thoughtfully and participate in Q&As
after the readings suggesting that poetry is not dead,
but also in the comments that I get from people afterwards
when I have a chance to talk with them.
People do seem to be moved.
They do seem to want to have the conversation and I think it's
because this is what poetry can do for us in ways
that our ordinary conversation between each other can't quite do.
It is that elegant and memorable language of poetry
that touches not only the heart, but also the intellect and makes
for us a safe place to deal with what is both traumatic and difficult
and is seemingly divisive in a way that brings us all in under
that you know the umbrella
or that elegant envelope of forum that a poem is.
[ Silence ]   >> Oh geez.
>> Hi and congratulations again on your Laureateship.
>> Natasha Trethewey: Thank you.
>> My question actually is about masses since you mentioned it--
>> Natasha Trethewey: Um hmm.
>> In response to being [Inaudible] You said the three things
or the one main of the three things is to bring poetry
to a wider audience and I know both [Inaudible] you did
so much for both photography--   >> Natasha Trethewey: Um hmm.
>> And now recently painting.   >> Natasha Trethewey: Um hmm.
>> Could you talk about your relationship to the image
or specifically to visual art and this part of that
about broadening the audience into poetry,
like going to another medium--   >> Natasha Trethewey: Um hmm.
>> Or is it just something that you're specifically drawn
to in dealing with the visual art?
>> Natasha Trethewey: Well, I think I'm drawn first to the image
because it really is how memory works,
particularly in the visual memories that we have.
And so, even as a child I began trying to record everything
that I wanted to hold onto visually in memory.
I would make photographs in my head of every room
in my grandmother's house because I wanted to keep it with me
and be able to recall all of it.
So, that was some early practice with working with imagery.
Imagery is also the thing that we have that is useful
for helping someone else to see things as we see them,
to present a vision of the world as specifically as possible
in the image, the imagery of a poem.
And for me writing about photographs and also writing
about paintings is a way to begin with that given image.
And I like to begin with the given image not only because it is a way
of seeing and conveying to others what I see, but also the images
that we are given in the frames of paintings or in the frames
of a photograph also suggests so much possibility
for what's not been seen.
I'm always interested in what it is we can't see,
what's just outside the frame of a photograph,
what happened just before or after.
And the way that when we read photographs there is always
that kind of sort of pang of nostalgia, the way that we can know
so much about the lives of the people in them
that they couldn't have known at that particular historical moment.
So, it is a way also of entering into history for me.
[ Silence ]
>> As we enter this digital age what do you see
or how do you see it affecting the future
of poetry compared to days gone by?   >> Natasha Trethewey: Um hmm.
Well, I think it's exciting because there's the possibility
of poetry reaching so many more people through yet another medium.
For example, at Emory University where I'm
on the faculty we have an online journal called, "Southern Spaces"
and there are many other online journals that have come
up in the last few years.
But, this is a journal in which we publish a segment called,
"Poets in Place" and we follow poets to their geographical locations,
the regions of the country or other places they write about,
videotaping them as they talk about the place, reading their own poems.
And we put these little videos documentaries up on the web as well
as the text of the poems appear and we know
that we get hits all around the world now.
So, people who might not have seen these poets before are getting some
exposure to them because of digital media.
I also know that The Academy of American Poets sends
out little poetry as a broadcast over text messages,
so people who are subscribed will receive a poem a day to wake
up and start the day with.
Again, something that we might not have been able
to do before unless we you know had a moment to pick up a book
and read it before we left the house.
But, you know even on the train you probably have your phone with you,
your smart phone and you can read that poem that's been sent to you.
I think it's exciting.
I think anything that helps us have more access to poems is pretty good.
[ Silence ]
>> Hi, you mentioned that this invisible war continues,
how do you think that war is [Inaudible]?
>> Natasha Trethewey: Well, one of the ways that I see it manifest is
that the contentions over the Confederate flag for example
and these are contentions that have happened in sort of both
of the states that I've lived in, my native state Mississippi,
but also the state of Georgia.
So, for example the state of Georgia went through a battle
in the last 10 years or so about part of the population wanting
to change the flag that we have from the original Georgia flag
that had the Confederate symbol on it.
And when you read the newspapers
about the debate surrounding the flag one of the interesting things
that comes up is that people aren't quite sure about the history.
Many people don't actually know that the flag that we had in Georgia
that we did vote to get rid
of not too long ago was not the original Confederate flag
that we had I think back in 1896 or something like that,
around the turn of the century.
The flag that we had all this time with the Confederate symbol
on it is a flag adopted in 1955 or so just
after the Brown V Board of Education decision.
So, indeed it was a flag that was a response to something that happened
that some of the population weren't happy about.
But, there are people right now who don't know that they actually--
that wasn't the original flag and that indeed it did have something
to do with contests over race and social justice.
That's just one of the places that I do think we see these conversations
and the contentions about the memory of The Civil War
and what certain symbols have meant, ongoing.
[ Silence ]   >> [Inaudible comments]
>> Natasha Trethewey: Yea.   So, one more question perhaps.
>> Can you comment on your personal ambitions as a poet or the next year
or ten years or the rest of your career?
>> Natasha Trethewey: You know that sounds like a hard question,
but it's a lot easier than it sounds.
You know the biggest ambition that I have as a poet personally is
to write a better poem than the last poem I wrote.
So, it's an easy answer, but it's a hard thing to do.
I'll try though.   Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of The Library of Congress.